The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature eBook

uninjured and undiminished, and would laugh at the
destruction of the world as an illusion. This
conclusion per impossible may be balanced by
the counter-conclusion, which is on all fours with
it, that if that last individual were to be annihilated
in and with him the whole world would be destroyed.
It was in this sense that the mystic Angelas Silesius[1]
declared that God could not live for a moment without
him, and that if he were to be annihilated God must
of necessity give up the ghost:

But the empirical point of view also to some extent
enables us to perceive that it is true, or at least
possible, that our self can exist in other beings
whose consciousness is separated and different from
our own. That this is so is shown by the experience
of somnambulists. Although the identity of their
ego is preserved throughout, they know nothing, when
they awake, of all that a moment before they themselves
said, did or suffered. So entirely is the individual
consciousness a phenomenon that even in the same ego
two consciousnesses can arise of which the one knows
nothing of the other.

GOVERNMENT.

It is a characteristic failing of the Germans to look
in the clouds for what lies at their feet. An
excellent example of this is furnished by the treatment
which the idea of Natural Right has received
at the hands of professors of philosophy. When
they are called upon to explain those simple relations
of human life which make up the substance of this
right, such as Right and Wrong, Property, State, Punishment
and so on, they have recourse to the most extravagant,
abstract, remote and meaningless conceptions, and out
of them build a Tower of Babel reaching to the clouds,
and taking this or that form according to the special
whim of the professor for the time being. The
clearest and simplest relations of life, such as affect
us directly, are thus made quite unintelligible, to
the great detriment of the young people who are educated
in such a school. These relations themselves
are perfectly simple and easily understood—­as
the reader may convince himself if he will turn to
the account which I have given of them in the Foundation
of Morality, Sec. 17, and in my chief work, bk.
i., Sec. 62. But at the sound of certain words,
like Right, Freedom, the Good, Being—­this
nugatory infinitive of the cupola—­and many
others of the same sort, the German’s head begins
to swim, and falling straightway into a kind of delirium
he launches forth into high-flown phrases which have
no meaning whatever. He takes the most remote
and empty conceptions, and strings them together artificially,
instead of fixing his eyes on the facts, and looking
at things and relations as they really are. It
is these things and relations which supply the ideas
of Right and Freedom, and give them the only true meaning
that they possess.